Sun, sand and surf were everyone's prescription for holiday paradise, but, in the south of
Japan, they leave nothing to Mother Nature. Inside a huge dome that could house six football
pitches, the world’s largest artificial sea washes over the biggest indoor beach, fringed with
fake palm trees and other eye-popping innovations that have given a holiday make-over to old
Mother Nature. 

This evocative 21st Century resort shows that even paradise has room for improvement.
In Ocean Dome, once every hour, on the hour, the surf is always up. Every afternoon is a
carnival. Mechanized parrots squawk from branches of the dome’s ingenious rain forest,
which remain lush and tropical without rainfall or humidity. Best of all, in Ocean Dome, you
can lull for hours on crushed marble pebbles without a worry about beach vendors, bugs
or sun burns. 

Instead, perfectly-timed waves whip equally well-groomed surfers along in 28-degree,
chlorinated, salt-free water to the sanitized shore where they drip-dry in Ocean Dome’s
perfect climate, which remains a delightful 30 degrees, day and night, 365.25 days each
year.

Perhaps the best designed beach on the planet sits inside a massive dome measuring 300
by 100 meters, about 1,500 kilometers south of Tokyo in Miyazaki, on Japan’s southernmost
Kyushu Island. A heated ocean with a width of 140 meters sends 13,500 tons of salt-free
water sweeping across 600 tons of polished marble chips that constitute a 85-metre long
shoreline, ringed by a three-story promenade of shops.

This prepackaged holiday vision of the future is part of an enormous US$2 billion
recreational complex called Seagaia. The name itself is an odd concoction, melding the English
word for the sea with "Gaia," an ancient Greek word for the Earth. "The name of a true paradise
expresses the admiration for the perfect combination of sea and earth," explains one brochure
from Seagaia, which ends: "This is a place where we can feel that we are part of nature."